Gary Vaynerchuk's New App Lets People Pay For Tables At The Hottest Restaurants

Minetta Tavern is one New
York City restaurant teaming up with Resy.ht,
Flickr

Serious foodies know all too well how difficult it can be to get
a reservation at a top restaurant. Reservations fill up weeks in
advance, and snagging a spot can often come down to being on the
phone at the exact right moment.

Entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk has teamed up with CrowdTwist
co-founder Mike Montero and Eater co-founder Ben Leventhal to
create Resy, an app that allows
users to pay for the reservation they want.

"The world is calibrated to people who are
okay going on OpenTable 30 days out, or who don't mind making
four phone calls or sending three or four emails and going back
and forth and figuring out, okay I got that one. That's a
process. There's tons and tons of friction there,"
Leventhal said to
Eater.

With Resy, if you decide at the last minute you want to have
Saturday night dinner at Minetta Tavern, you can pay $50 on Resy
to get a reservation. The price varies, so that a weeknight
reservation at Charlie Bird, for example, could cost as little as
$10 a person.

"There's a price tag associated
with the seat now, but really what we feel like we're doing
fundamentally is improving exponentially the experience of
getting a reservation," Leventhal said. "If
you have all the time in the world and you want to book 30 days
out or you want to tell your assistant to pound away at the
phones and the email for an hour you can still do that. Those are
not the tables we're talking about."

The tables Resy offers on their platform are not the same tables
customers compete to get weeks in advance. These are premium
seats that are held for special guests but that may not be used
on any given night.

"What Resy is doing is creating another store of value
that's giving the restaurants an opportunity to actually offer
the tables to more people. When you buy a table on Resy the
restaurant knows you're going to show up," Leventhal said
to Eater. "There's a much bigger idea here around us
unlocking inventory that was never before available to the
general public."

It also helps restaurants to generate incremental revenue, making
the most of the VIP tables that may not be used otherwise. Resy
does a revenue share with each of their partnered restaurants.

So far, the
food world has been hesitant to embrace Resy, claiming
that charging for something that used to be free excludes a
segment of consumers. New York Times food critic Pete Wells and
Eater food critic Ryan Sutton weighed in on
Twitter:Twitter,
@pete_wells

"I think there's a mis-notion that everybody's going to
say, well I have to pay now, and this is elitist. I actually
think it's the reverse," Vaynerchuk
told Eater. "I think there's a gross misunderstanding of how
hard it is to actually get into these places and that the minimal
cash expense, which is maybe the upgrade of a dessert cost, is
actually going to allow for more democracy, not less."

Resy is launching in beta on iOS and Android in June. Among
the New York restaurants participating in the launch are
Balthazar, Minetta Tavern, Charlie Bird, Morandi, Lure Fish Bar,
and Rosemary's. They hope to expand to more restaurants in New
York and other cities by September.